Recently I was reminded painfully of the fact that habits you have taken to once hardly ever get laid off.I usually consider myself someone who tries to write software after I have thought it through. I do not mean
"over-engineering", "over-abstracting" and "over-prepare-for-anything-that-might-ever-come'ing".
However I also believe that starting hacking blindly is not a good thing either. And I
try to write "nice" code, even though it might be a little more work, as long as it is easier to read or
just plain more stable (which is often the same).Sometimes however, especially under a tight schedule, by force of habit I (and probably any developer out
there) tend to do things that upon later review make me feel deeply embarrassed. Just so I did a couple of
weeks ago...I had to write a component that translates data from a legacy system, stored in plain text files, into a
relational database, accessed through an object relational mapping lay…

Development of a more structured version is in progress. I just committed a set of changes to the repository that changes the current, rather monolithic, single-class design to what will be the first step of a more modular one.Currently the generation of ALTER TABLE statements has been removed and the output format of the analysis is slightly different. But that is mere cosmetic.What is much more important is that now the gathering of database schema information is based on a pluggable system, designed around an interface called IndexDescriptorProvider. Up to now I have just ported the MySQL 4 stuff that was already in the first version to this new architecture. Please feel free to have a look at it and tell me what you think.Next thing I'll do is implement a provider based on the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database available in MySQL 5.x to see if I missed anything.Go to http://mysql-index-analyzer.blogspot.com for details.

I posted some Basic Documentation for MySQL Index Analyzer including a simple example. This is intented to get started with the tool without having to read the code.Any ideas and suggestions for improvements are appreciated :)

I wrote about the "buggyness" of the Windows Compressed Folders feature before. However today I found out an even more unbelievable bug.I copied a ZIP file containing several thousand files onto a Windows 2003 Server machine (with SP1). Once it was there I connected via RDP and right-clicked the file in the Explorer, choosing "Extract All" from the context menu.After clicking "Next" to get past the "Welcome to the Decompression Idio^H^H^H^HWizard" I chose the target directory and hit "Next" again. Immediately I was asked whether I wanted to overwrite a file already existing in the target location. As I had created a new folder to hold the archive contents I was somewhat suprised by this dialog; so I cancelled the operation and tried again.Now you won't believe it: Once the decompression starts upon clicking the second "Next" button, this very same button remains enabled and functioning! Obviously I had (by accident) click…

Looking at the list of referrers for my 1st blog, I found one coming from Mike Kruckenberg. First of all it is a nice post to read for anyone who (has to) work with databases, so be sure you take a look.Moreover I learned about LogBuffer which I did not know before. So if anyone else dealing with databases does not know it yet, maybe you will it as interesting as I did.

Today a friend called, asking if I had any idea why his Windows XP machine did not display any picture miniature in the "My Pictures" folder anymore. He had already tried to reset file type associations and some other experiments, but without any luck. Moreover using JPG files as desktop background did not work anymore.After some thinking he rembered that the problem might first have occured after installing the first WMF hotfix published by Ilfak Guilfanov
even before Microsoft provided a patch.This led us to the solution. First we made sure that the patch was uninstalled by issuing the following command:
msiexec.exe /X{E1CDC5B0-7AFB-11DA-8CD6-0800200C9A66}If it tells you, the program is not installed currently, you should be able to remove it from the "Add/Remove Software" control panel applet or by running "c:\Program Files\WindowMetafile\Fixunins000.exe".Finally we re-registered the Windows picture and fax viewer library by issuing this commands:
reg…

This is my first entry to my freshly opened blog at blogger.com. I will try this out for a little to see if I like it more than JRoller, where I currently keep my blog. I will probably keep the two in sync for a while to get an idea of which one suits me better.

Just another one of those "reminder" posts. After installing Ubuntu it booted with the splash screen in 640x480. As I can never remember the mode number for 1280x1024, here it is:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-25-686 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash vga=794
This of course also lets you see much more text on a VT.